Today on Kickstarter, Nocturnal Media is proud to launch the funding project for Cold Shadows, an espionage RPG inspired by John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, the Cold War, and narrative roleplaying.

Cold Shadows uses a ruleset licensed from John Wick Presents, and expanded and modified for the espionage genre. A talented team of writers, including Nocturnal Media associate producer and senior game designer Alan Bahr, Ben Woerner from Woerner Wunderwerks, Liz Chaipraditkul from Angry Hampster Publishing, and Tobie Abad from TAGSessions are working together to craft a narrative RPG that chronicles the elaborate plots and tensions that evolve over years of spycraft and espionage work.

Cold Shadows will have the following in the core game:

Rules for playing as high-level operatives in an Agency

Rules for one player and one Narrator

Rules for Narrator-less play

A chapter on generating a City with rules for how that impacts your Agents

Chapters on fighting styles

Information about historical and modern espionage organizations

A chapter on women in the Cold War and espionage cinema

And much more!

The Kickstarter project includes:

150+ page core rulebook

40+ page “Black Book” with NPCs, enemy agents and more

custom six-sided dice

Trust tokens that are used between teammates but can be turned against the Agents.

Stretch goals to add cards to the Storypath Cards deck Path of Shadows.

Also, we are participating in the make/100 initiative from Kickstarter. As part of an Honourable Operative pledge level, 100 backers will receive copies of unique communiques written by our team. These will only be produced for those pledge levels as part of this Kickstarter, and will be useful as props, adventure seeds, and handouts to players.

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All the latest news from Nocturnal Media scrolls down the screen at the left, but in addition to announcements and updates, this section contains blog-like material by Stewart Wieck, owner of Nocturnal Media. These more personal pieces could have a section of their own, but it seemed better to consider them in the context of the concurrent news. In this way, the business information and the blog entries together form a sort of digital history of Nocturnal Media and game-designer & author Stewart Wieck.